Man and Wife

This bracing, intelligent debut tackles the strangeness of growing up, the joys and difficulties of breaking away from family, and our sometimes absurd or downright dangerous rites of passage. The girls and women in these stories come up against the rules and roles that give shape to their worlds. As marriages are arranged over tea, blood feuds simmer beneath football games, and the ruins of a city burn, they struggle between holding on to their families and seeking out new ways to live and love.

These stories ask, as our hands slip from the long line of tradition and we become refugees from home, what, if anything, is lost. And how is it that what we thought we’d let go keeps finding its way back?

PRAISE FOR MAN AND WIFE:

“Katie Chase’s stories have a rhythm, a form, and a mesmerism all their own.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

“Toggling between the comic and the horrific, these brilliant stories rearrange the familiar into something more nuanced, fraught, and mysterious.” —Edan Lepucki, author of California

“With sharp, confident consideration of what it takes to survive in the world as a woman, Man and Wife introduces an important new literary voice.” —Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

“These slyly subversive stories tweak suburban reality in a manner reminiscent of ‘The Lottery’ or The Stepford Wives. Katie Chase’s narrators sound like the girl-next-door. . . if you lived next door to a parallel universe.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

“Captivating, haunting, and eerily smart. Every story in this collection gave me chills. Katie Chase is one of a kind.” —Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel